AI She hadn't meant to be in Richmond Park after dark.
The gates had been locked since sunset, the posted hours white on green and unambiguous, but the pedestrian gap by the Roehampton side had been left bent wide enough for a body to slip through if that body turned sideways and sucked in a breath. Rory did. Her shoulder bag caught on the iron and she had to tug it free. Straight black hair, cut blunt at her shoulders, swung forward and stuck to her cheek in the damp.
She pushed it back and stood still on the other side, listening.
Traffic should have been audible even here, a low wash from the A3, the occasional siren bleeding in from the city. There was nothing. The air was too still for a February night, not cold enough, not warm enough, just flat and close the way air got before a storm. She could hear her own breathing too loud inside her jacket.
She told herself she was being stupid. She'd been through the park a hundred times on her bike doing drops for the Golden Empress, cutting across on daylight routes where the deer watched her pass with bored eyes. She knew this place. That was why Eva's text had made any sense at all.
*Can't find it. You know the one with the stones? Meet me?* No reply after.
Eva never turned her location off. Rory had checked. The dot had pulsed steadily in the middle of the park, right where the old oaks stood in a rough circle that most joggers assumed was some kind of folly and most dog walkers avoided because the dogs wouldn't go in. The Grove. Isolde's grove, though Rory had never heard anyone call it that out loud until last autumn. She'd told Eva not to go there alone. Eva had laughed.
Now Rory was alone instead.
She started walking.
Her trainers sank a little into the path. It had rained in the afternoon and the ground should have been mud and churned leaves, but under the oaks it turned spongy, too soft, and strangely lit. She clicked on her phone torch and then immediately clicked it off again. The dark felt less hostile than the narrow cone of light that made everything beyond it blacker. Moonlight should have been enough but the canopy was thick for winter, branches bare and interlaced overhead, and still, impossibly, the clearing ahead was visible.
The standing stones marked the boundary. They weren't decorative. They were ancient oaks themselves, or what was left of them, trunk-thick pillars of wood gone stony with age, bark fused into ridges that looked carved. Seven of them, leaning inward like listeners. Between them the ground was covered in wildflowers.
Rory stopped at the edge.
Wildflowers did not bloom in Richmond Park in February. Not like this. The little white and yellow heads were open wide, phosphorescent in the gloom , and there were too many of them, a carpet so dense it hid the soil. The air smelled sweet and green, summer-heavy, wrong against the crisp night at her back.
The pendant thumped once against her collarbone.
She flinched. Her hand went to it on reflex, fingers closing around the silver chain. The Heartstone was roughly the size of her thumbnail, deep crimson even in the dark, and it had been inert as a bead when she'd left the flat above Silas' bar, cold against her skin under her shirt. Now it pulsed . Not light, not quite. A faint inner glow that she felt more than saw, and a wash of warmth that spread from the stone into her palm, up the tendons of her wrist.
Near a Hel portal, Isolde had told her once, it would do that. Near a thinning.
Rory's mouth went dry. She let go of the stone quickly , as if letting go would stop it . It kept pulsing, slow and steady, in time with something that was not her heartbeat.
"Eva?" she called. Her voice sounded small. It didn't carry the way a voice should carry in an open space. The trees swallowed it.
No answer.
She stepped between two of the standing stones because not stepping in felt suddenly like a different kind of decision, one that would be noticed. The temperature changed between one footfall and the next. The sweet smell got stronger. The sound of the city, already faint, cut out entirely, as if someone had closed a door.
Behind her, the path she'd come down was gone . Not dark. Gone. The trees were seamless. Rory turned in a full circle, cool-headed panic flaring bright and precise behind her ribs. She counted the stones again to fix them in place. Seven. There were still seven. But she was sure, absolutely sure, that the gap she'd entered through had been to her north and now it was to her south, or the stones had turned while she wasn't looking .
She checked her phone. 22:14. She stared at it, held it up, lowered it, checked again. 22:14. The numbers didn't change. The signal bar was empty. The location dot that had been Eva's was gone . Her own dot hovered in grey nothing, then jittered and vanished.
Time moves differently inside. Isolde had said it like a warning and a joke at once. An hour can be minutes. Or days.
"Eva, this isn't funny," she said, louder this time, and the wildflowers shivered.
There was no wind.
Rory watched the shiver travel outward from where she stood, a ripple through the white blooms as if something had brushed them at ankle height and kept going. She held very still. The bright blue of her eyes was useless in this light; everything was green-grey and red afterimages from the stone's glow.
Another ripple. Closer to the far stones this time. She heard it before she saw it next — a soft press of undergrowth, a footfall that was not hers, light and deliberate, on ground that shouldn't make that sound . Her head snapped toward it. Nothing there. Only flowers, only shadow between the trunks.
She became aware that she was rubbing her left wrist with her thumb, pressing hard into the small crescent-shaped scar there, the one from when she was nine and caught her arm on the barbed fence behind her parents' house in Cardiff. She did that when she was thinking fast and didn't want anyone to see her thinking at all. She made herself stop.
Cool-headed, she told herself. Be cool-headed. Quick and out-of-the-box, right? So think.
She had come because Eva asked. Eva wasn't here. The pendant was warm because the thinning was close. Therefore she should leave. Simple logic. Except the way out had moved, and the air had weight now, and she had the distinct, skin-prickling certainty that if she turned her back on the center of the grove something would be closer when she turned back around.
She turned anyway, sharply , toward the largest stone, because the alternative was to stand and wait to be approached.
The clearing was empty. And then — at the very edge of vision, not where she was looking but where the eye catches movement — something shifted. Tall, too tall, and too still. She whipped her gaze to it and there was only bark, only shadow. But the afterimage remained: a suggestion of limbs that were too long, a head cocked at an angle no human neck would tolerate, standing just behind a trunk that wasn't wide enough to hide it.
Her breath caught. The Heartstone flared hotter against her skin, almost uncomfortable. She took a step back without meaning to and her heel crushed flowers that gave off a burst of too-sweet perfume and did not spring back up.
Another footfall . This time behind her. Soft. Patient. As if whatever made it was in no hurry and knew she would hear it.
Rory spun. Nothing. She spun again, faster, hair whipping, and caught it — or caught the absence where it had been — a smear of pale movement slipping between two stones, there and then not, accompanied by a sound that was almost a breath, almost a laugh, almost the rustle of leaves in a language.
She pressed her back to the largest standing stone before she realized she'd moved. The bark was cold through her coat. Solid. That helped. She could feel her own pulse hammering against the wood.
The wildflowers were all leaning now. Every single head, slightly , toward the center of the grove. Toward her. She looked down and the sweetness turned sickly in her throat. In the faint crimson light leaking from her collar, she saw that the flowers had not been trampled where she stepped. They had folded. Deliberately, neatly, away from her foot, leaving a perfect print in the living carpet, and then they had not unfolded.
Something was standing in the middle of the clearing. She hadn't seen it arrive. It was simply there, where a second ago there had been empty air, as if it had been there the whole time and her eyes had finally learned how to see it.
It was shaped like a person the way a reflection is shaped like a person, with the proportions stretched just enough to be wrong, its skin the grey of lichen, its hair a tangle that might have been twigs. Its eyes caught the Heartstone's glow and threw it back. It wasn't looking at Rory. It was looking at the pendant, and its head tilted.
Rory's hand found the stone again and clenched. The warmth burned now. She thought, absurdly and with perfect clarity, about the delivery bag still hanging from her shoulder, the insulated box inside empty, the way Yu-Fei would dock her pay if she lost it. The thought anchored her.
The thing smiled, or its mouth widened. The wildflowers shivered again, a full wave this time, and the standing stones seemed to lean in, listening.
Behind her, where the way out should have been, she heard very clearly, in Eva's voice, light and a little out of breath as if she'd been running,
"Rory? Over here. I found it."
Rory didn't move. The voice had come from the wrong direction, from deeper in the grove, from the place where the air was thickest. Her thumb found the little crescent scar on her wrist and pressed until it hurt, until the sting was real and sharp and hers. She stayed pinned to the stone, bright blue eyes fixed on the thing in the clearing that was wearing a smile that didn't fit its face, and she understood, with a cold, quick click of thought, that whatever had called her here was still calling , and that it had learned exactly how to sound like someone she would follow.
The pendant pulsed , and the grove held its breath, and waited to see if she would answer.